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Rebecca Norlander gives us a thorough demo of Windows XP Service Pack 2. Takes about 10 minutes. There's a lot in SP2, and this will get you up to date. New wireless features. Tons of security updates and enhancements. And more.

I totally think SP2 is going in the right direction.
The functionality changes being introduced will do a great job at stopping people from unknowingly filling their computer with junk...based on yesterday & todays threats. As I've posted elsewhere, I think there is a long way to go yet when protecting threats
from inside the OS...not all threats come from the outside (i.e. internet) in.

I get a tad jumpy when a PM @ MS considers going to a "grassroots" support org. for help with the new features the ideal choice...That implies some subtle...but...disturbing trends going forward. Windows isn't open source and shouldn't be supported like it
is...

Either way, SP2 is really coming together and will be a must-have for all Windows XP users.

mhawley: agreed. Doing demos on screen is pretty tough with these low-end cameras we use.

I didn't shoot these but it's hard cause the focus doesn't work well when zoomed in.

I've been working on this and future videos will improve somewhat. The problem is we do all this stuff with one take, no professional equipment, and no professional camera crew. Excuses excuses, I know.

And if you want to move the camera closer (to get around the zooming/focus problem) you get a lot of camera shake.

CypherXero: I try never to promise ship dates. Why? Because the ship dates are set based on a whole raft of testing and customer feedback data and can change at any time. Right now, though, I believe the schedule is set for July. Just want to set expectations
properly.

Another master piece.. I'am so used to that screen it is unimagionable.. Though, after installing Sp2 there is a great increase in speed, well, there is on this computer for some reason, and after you uninstall it, it goes even faster. Any explanation
to that? Or is this computer just phenominal?
Once more... The SP2 videos are great! Can't wait to see what you guys are up to next..

Maybe, in the next release of windows Xp service pack 2, you guys (sp2 beta team) can update the "windows error reporting"
Since alot of software vendors do not accept "error reporting" you guys can add another option when an error occurs..

We're starting to get transcripts of the videos. Here's the transcript for this video:

Norlander: Do the full gamut, and you guys can pick and choose the things that you want to show. The first one that I wanted to show was along the lines of user experience, which we talked about an awful lot.

One of the first screens that people will see is the automatic update screen. In the past, you could choose to turn it on or turn it off, and the default was to turn it off. Now what you can choose is to turn it on or to be reminded to turn it on later.

Automatic updates is a really important part of keeping your system up to date and safe. That’s the first thing that I show. The second thing that I was going to show is you’ll notice that there’s an icon down here. Right now it’s a little scary red shield
with an X on it. That is because if I open that, I go to the new security center.

This is kind of a one-stop shopping place for consumers where they can go and see what the status of their computer is. Here it will tell you if your firewall is on and up to date.

We’re letting other vendors plug into that. It will tell you if automatic updates has been selected, and it will tell you some information about your virus protection. We’re working with all the virus vendors to try and make sure that their stuff plugs into
this.

There’s a way that they can plug in and their software can say, You’re out of date, you need to pick up some new signatures, you need to see whatever.

Right now I’ve got it set up such that it tells me that I’ve got a problem with my virus software. If I come down here, you can see that I have disabled real time monitoring.

If I go ahead and select that I’d like to monitor in both directions, [unintelligible] so what happens is I have not updated E-trust for a while on this machine.

We can go back and I’ll change the date so that you can see that it turns to green. [Unintelligible]. The next thing that I’ll show is the firewall.

We talked about the firewall. I’ll go up here. I can look at the firewall through here. I don’t want that one, I want to start the firewall [unintelligible]. Here’s an exceptions list.

What I was making sure of was that I had not already played Net Chess on this machine; therefore, it would not see all the cool dialogues. I’ll go ahead and put this away for a moment. I’ll come over here and start a rousing game of Net Chess.

Here I am and I’m in Net Chess. I would like to play a Network game, because it’s so much more fun to play against a real person than it is against my computer. I’ll go ahead and say, I’d like to play a new game, and I’ll be the white team.

Here we have a security alert. It tells you, Hey, check it out. This particular program, in this case, Net Chess, by the following publisher is requesting to receive information from the network, which, obviously, they have to do in order for me to communicate
with the chess game.

We’ve got three options. Again, none of them are selected. You have to take an action. You can’t just hit okay, which was a common problem in the past. You can choose to unblock the program, if you’re familiar with it and you’re comfortable and you want to
play the game in this case.

You can keep blocking this program, in which case I won’t be able to play Net Chess, but I will be safe from anybody using that particular port for traffic. Or, I can keep blocking it now, but I can get asked again later.

If I’m not really sure and I want to send mail, for example, to the community, to my grass roots community, and say, Hey, I keep getting this thing about this program.

Should I let it talk on the network or not? Then I can select that one. In this case, I’ll go ahead and hit unblock this program. If anybody was out there waiting for me, I would be able to go ahead and play Net Chess. If I come back here and check out security
center and go to the Windows Firewall, if I look at the exceptions list, I now have Net Chess set up there and allow it to communicate.

Interviewer: It’s important that it’s also programs and services, because it doesn’t necessarily have to have UI or be running in context of the shell to try and make- excellent.

Norlander: That’s right. I can go ahead and delete it, if I decide that Net Chess needs to be updated or if there’s an X point, go ahead and say, Yes, I’d like to get rid of that, that’s terrible. Then I’m all set.

Am I going to be able to say, Don’t ever let Internet Explorer make any requests off [unintelligible]? I mean I guess that would be hard. The point is, can you shut down control over- if I know in some application there’s a bug, and a [unintelligible] one’s
been found, can I just say, Okay, this guy cannot play on the network any more?

Norlander: Yeah, I can go into my Windows Firewall, and if that’s one of the programs that I’ve said, yes, absolutely, let that thing go and talk to whoever it wants to and let people talk back to it, then I can say, No, not any more. I’d like to
remove that from my exceptions list.

You’ll notice in the exceptions list that you have a bunch of things that are simply unchecked, but they’re added there by default. Let’s say I still had Net Chess—I just deleted it for you—but let’s say I still had Net Chess, I could have just unchecked it,
and then I can go back and check it again and say, No, I would like that to be turned on by default.

There you go. One of the other things that we’ve talked an awful lot about is e-mail. All kinds of exciting things come through e-mail. In fact, I was looking around and somebody was phishing e-mail this morning—phishing with a ph instead of an f, trying to
get me to go and enter information about my bank account.

Mine was from US Bank, and I actually have an account at US Bank. I opened the mail and I was like, it says I can’t call customer support. I bet that’s wrong. Most people don’t know that.

Interviewer: I noticed the grammar here in the mail, and that was my first [unintelligible].

Norlander: That’s one of the things that’s very common in these mails they’ll have a grammar error- a grammatical error because most of them are not US origin.

If you get something, and you’re like, Wow, I don’t think US Bank would send me something with all those misspellings and grammatical errors, that’s because they wouldn’t, at least, not that I’ve seen. In this particular case, what we’ve got is an e-mail that
had an attachment. In fact, SoBig F was a screen saver, which is SCR.

What Outlook Express does it goes ahead and just removes access to the unsafe attachment, so that you can’t click on it and do something like create the next SoBig or whatever. That same type of thing in terms of attachment management services is available
through OE, through IE, and through Windows Messenger. We use the same mechanism. In fact, people can hook into that and also ask for scanning, etc.

Interviewer: It’s a public API. How does that work in through IE? If I navigate to an URL that has SCR [unintelligible]?

Norlander: Yeah, essentially, and I’ll show you a demo of that in just a moment. When you have the option to download an Active X control or any kind of code, it will give you extra information about it. In some cases, it will say, No, we’re just
going block that.

What Attachment Management Services allows you to do is to hook into—at least eventually it will allow you to hook into an antivirus program, whatever’s on your machine, if they choose to update it with- so that it will talk through that.

What happens is as soon as you click on that, you’ll start your virus scanner against whatever the package is that you’re trying to download it, and it will have a chance to check and see if there’s viruses in it. You’ll notice that across the top it’s a little
bit hard to see. There’s kind of a yellow bar that gives you information. You’ll notice when we go into IE that you have some similar UI.

This goes back to the user experience of trying to create things that look as similar as possible so that people know that there’s something to watch for. In this case, again, you have the yellow bar. You don’t have another dialogue, because, of course, we
had what people called dialogue fatigue with IE in the past. Instead, you get a little information bar.

What I’ve done on my own computer is, I’ll just go ahead and try to do whatever I’m trying to do without ever doing anything, without taking any actions. I have a lot of pop-ups that are blocked, which is great for me, because I don’t really like them.

I haven’t found that the behavior of the browser or the overall functionality in terms of what I’m trying to do or achieve has gotten worse. In fact, it seems fine to me. That’s great. What I can do, though, is I can come up here and I have a set of options.

This is not final, so it may change by the time we get to RC2 or even RTM based on user feedback. In this case, I can select that I’d like to show the blocked pop-up. I can even add this site to a list that allows me to get pop-ups from the site.

For me, for example, I like weather.com, and they have all these goofy little things that come up and tell you about the weather. I might say Allow pop-ups from weather.com. I can turn off the pop-up blocker altogether; I can get more information, etc.

I’m going to go ahead and keep blocking it, because who needs it? Now I come in, and I’ve got this bar again that said, Hey, now we’re trying to put some kind of code on your machine.

At this point, this is where you could scan for viruses or do all kinds of other things if you hooked into the Attachment Management Services, if you’re a developer. Instead of having a dialogue, I just have this yellow bar.

For me, because I’m going to a travel site in this case, I actually want to book my travel, it’s clear that I’m going to need to do something, because I need to be able to pick a date. I’ll come up here.

I can allow this page to install Active X Controls, so I’ll select that. Then I get a slimmed down dialogue. In the days of yore, you’d have this big dialogue with a bunch of data and content and scary warnings and all kinds of other things.

Nobody knew what the heck we were talking about. Most of the time what people would do is they’d just hit enter until the dialogue went away. Previously, the defaults were: yes, I want to install it, it’s okay to go ahead and install it; put it wherever you
want on my machine.

If I’m just hitting enter in order to get a way from the dialogues because they’re intimidating me, I just put something on my machine, and I don’t know whether I like it or not.

There’s two things: there’s a lot less information, there’s the name of the control, there’s the publisher of the control, and then there’s a link down at the bottom that says, How can I decide what software to install that will take people to a site that says,
Here’s how to make some informed decisions.

You’ll notice that I can- if I hit return on this, the default is don’t install. I get nothing now. My site wouldn’t work, and I’d be a little bit disappointed; but, it does give the person more control, and it is the safer option.

I also, if I’d like to have more options, I can go ahead and have very similar options to what I have with pop-up blocking and some of the other things that we’ve done, Windows Firewall, for example. It’s always- I’m always going to allow this to happen.

I’m never going to allow this to happen, or I’m going to have it ask me every single time. I’m going to keep it at ask me every single time. I can go ahead and say, I’d like to install it. It goes ahead and installs it and my page will work.

No kidding! That was ridiculous. The camera person was recording the laptop like it was an interview with a person -- you don't often zoom in on the dude's nose, right? Well, next time zoom in on the dialogs so that we can see what they heck is going
on.

Also, I liked the firewall stuff that I heard. Sounds like MS at the same old game of copying what other companies do that seem to work. I hope that instead of just copying other companies' ideas, MS improves on them...takes them one (or more) step(s) further.
Oh well, if makes Windows better and safeer, so be it.

mhawley: agreed. Doing demos on screen is pretty tough with these low-end cameras we use.

I didn't shoot these but it's hard cause the focus doesn't work well when zoomed in.

I've been working on this and future videos will improve somewhat. The problem is we do all this stuff with one take, no professional equipment, and no professional camera crew. Excuses excuses, I know.

And if you want to move the camera closer (to get around the zooming/focus problem) you get a lot of camera shake.

It's amazing how the simplest videography is often the best. Sure, it's difficult to pan, tilt, zoom and focus at once, but the basics are what is most important: composition, lighting, subject and features.

If you can get those down, it doesn't matter who shoots it or on what equipment.

I used to love doing TV shoots at big concerts because it was such a huge stretch. To be on stage trying to capture the audience, move to a certain rhythm, be doing zooms and tilts and pans and focussing... It got to the point where you really really felt good
when you 'accomplished' a certain shot you'd been to scared to try for 3-4 concerts.

Video's a lot of fun, and the flashy stuff aside, it's the same concepts whether you're shooting a crowd of 20,000 people or doing an interview. Don't move unless you have to. Always have good lighting. Makeup is your friend. Keep composition. Focus on what's
important. Don't zoom.

I think this was a nice video, but very difficult to see what Rebecca was actually showing on the screen. How about using screen-capture software (e.g. Camtasia) to directly capture the screen video? According to Camtasia's website
http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/default.asp, Microsoft already uses Camtasia to produce Windows XP demos.

I was just thinking that if they use a tripod maybe there would be less shake and all. I use a tripod when I make videos and it works well. Also, some cameras come with a remote so you can zoom in and out without having to touch the camera, etc.

Hello from North Wales (UK), I have installed SP2 RC1 on my 'test' computer and I do like most of the changes that have been made, however does anyone know how to turn off the Log-on screen? SP2 has turned this on by default, I do not need or require a
Log-on, if this can't be turned off I will have to rollback the installation as this 'feature' annoys me.

Actually, you can lay the blame fully on me. This was the first time I have ever used a camcorder. I tried, and failed miserably on the demo part, but it's really hard to see what's going on in that little screen. Evry time I even touched the camera, it
would jiggle around all over the place. I couldn't figure out how to pann the camera to somewhere other than the middle of the screen because I had to move the tripod beyond the desired point and then it would spring back a little ways. Also, the zoom control
is a tiny notch and there is only one speed for zoom, fast. You should notice that after my first attempt at zooming in on a dialog, i pretty much just gave up and set the camera to view the entire screen for the rest of the demo.

Anyway, if you want to see what XPSP2 is like, you should install it. This video was just to show you what to look for.

-Bryn

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